posted March 29, 2006 06:15 PM         

Mother Water, Star of the Sea, Yemaya is the protector of women. Her healing powers are carried in the great waters, her energy powerful during the ebb and flow of life challenges.

West African, Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean goddess Yemaya is Mother Water, orisha of the oceans. She represents mother love and the affairs of women - fertility, children, birthing, the home and family. She is the merciful goddess of creation and protector of women during conception and childbirth, and of children during their childhood. She is the deep ocean of comfort for those in need.

African deities (orishas) are usually represented by flowing, swirling images of colour and movement, depicting the elemental energies rather than an anthropomorphised image. Yemaya's energy is depicted with sky blue, white and silver swirling colour. In other images, she is a mermaid or a beautiful woman.

Yemaya brings forth and protects life through all the highs and lows, even during the worst atrocities that can be suffered. She reminds women to take time out for themselves, to nurture their own needs and to respect their deserved position in life.

GEMSTONES: Lapis lazuli, aquamarine, turquoise (light blue stones), pearl, coral, mother-of-pearl (ocean-sourced).

http://www.goddess.com.au/goddesses/Yemaya.htm

posted March 29, 2006 07:11 PM         

O Mother of Waters!
Great is your power, your strength, and your light...
Let your greatness be the greatest wealth you dispense to me...
surrounded by sweet melodies springing from your own self...

Ymoja of the Great River
Yemaya of the Great Sea
My beautiful lady of the waters
Hear my wish addressed to thee
Yemaya make me (my life) fruitful
Yemaya bring my desires to me
Lady of the Magnificent Oceans
Hear my wish addressed to thee

posted March 29, 2006 11:22 PM         

In Brasil, on new year's eve, people celebrate the Feast of Yemanja on the beach by digging trenches in the sand and filling them with candles to create sacred space full of peace and serenity. At midnight they launch flowers and offerings into the sea and immerse themselves in the purifying and protective foamy mantle of the waves.

Here Yemanja, Goddess of the Ocean and Mother of Pearls, is shown standing on the waves offering her blessings for the families praying on the shore. She is the Orisha of procreation, gestation, and the family, and holds absolute reign over the hearth fire. Many in Brazil consider her to be the Mother of all Orishas. She is sometimes represented as a mermaid, a white seashell and the Virgin Mary. Mistress of the Line of Water Vibrations.

[traditional Brazilian image]

posted March 31, 2006 02:46 AM         

by Peter Culshaw

Sometimes you get the feeling you’ve been summoned. In this case by Yemaya, the Goddess of the Ocean. I’d had a week in Sao Paulo, doing a radio programme and collecting material for a compilation of new music from that fantastical, futuristic city with its 20 million inhabitants, massive skyscrapers, crazy traffic and favelas of the poor, a tropical flash of the future. Actually, I liked the city’s crazy energy, and musically the new scene there is very interesting. Until recently mainly young people in Third World countries wanted to imitate the West – be rock stars or rappers, for example. But there is emerging a whole dynamic scene of new music which uses electronics and interesting words all with a distinctly Brazilian flavour, a model to other new global music.

One night I saw a wonderfully inspiring dance group called Grupo Corpo – blondes, redheads, mulattos, Japanese-Brazilians and blacks mixed not for some cultural experiment but absolutely naturally, reflecting the different colours of Brazilian society. In a world going apparently crazy, this vision of athletic grace and togetherness was immensely moving, aided immensely by the brilliant and original music of Tom Ze, a godfather of the scene I started calling Sampa Nova. Another leading player called Suba tragically died for his music – rushing in to his burning studio to rescue his unfinished new album. Sampa is what the locals call the city – and this was a kind of answer to the Bossa Nova which was a style associated much more with Rio. I went round different studios and venues meeting scores of musicians and assembled enough material for a CD.

Goddess of the Ocean

But after a week of urban intensity I wanted to go somewhere else at least for a few days to escape. In London I’d asked a friend who knew Brazil where I should go; she suggested Fortaleza in the north-east of the country. What I realized on searching the net was the day after I was due to arrive was the Festival of Yemaya, the Goddess of the Ocean. This apparent coincidence electrified me as I’d recently written a song which included lyrics about Yemaya, who is also worshipped in Cuba, where I’d come across her. In Cuba and north-east Brazil there is a mixture of African and Catholic religions which they call Santeria in Cuba and Candomble in Brazil – the slaves were not allowed to worship their own African deities, so found Catholic saints with similar characteristics. Saint Lazaro, who rose from the dead is celebrated on the same day as Babalu-Aye, the Yoruba God of Healing in Cuba, for example. Yemaya seems to correspond with different saints in different countries.

The next day I arrived with Michelle, a Brazilian friend, on the beach where the Festival was to take place – at the Praia Do Futuro (the Beach of the Future). I was met by the amazing sight of hundreds of people dressed in blue and white, the colours of this Goddess. Many women were dressed as mermaids and drummers created a trance-like ambience – all these deities and saints have particular rhythms of their own. Some politicians were on the beach also, hoping to get people’s votes for the forthcoming election.

I asked assorted people who was the priest or priestess until I found myself talking to a kind of high priestess of Yemaya. Actually, she was one of the least noticeable of the often outrageously dressed women on the beach. In my experience, the most interesting spiritual practitioners are the most modest, spiritual arrogance being a great trap. Perhaps the most powerful and wise individual I’ve ever met was a quiet dervish in Istanbul who changed peoples lives just by being in the same room with them.

I chatted with the priestess about Yemaya. I asked her – we were after all on the ‘beach of the future’ – whether she could tell the future. ‘Sometimes’ she replied. She told me that Yemaya was a very chic Goddess, who enjoyed flowers and perfume. Indeed, many people were pouring perfume into the sea and the shore was strewn with roses and other flowers. Part of the power of the ritual is an immense sense of gratitude to the Goddess and the ocean for its riches and beauty – gratitude being a great virtue (they have so much less materially than we do, but are more thankful – figure that one out).

One of the keys to Santeria and Candomble is that the gods and goddesses have both good and evil characteristics, in that respect being similar to the Greek Pantheon. I suspect that the West and Islam’s split of good and evil is an important part of our societies’ neuroses and our tendencies towards various fundamentalisms. Many times in Brazil I found myself thinking how sane these people are, while the rest of the world seems to be going not so slowly insane. There is less of a split between the human and the divine, and between sensuality and sexuality and spirituality and an acceptance and joy of the human condition (just to hear the music and watch the dancing was confirmation enough of that). Of course, Brazil has many problems – particularly the poverty and violence in the favelas, to which their new President Lula hopes to make a difference.

Forewarning

At the end of our conversation the priestess said, almost in a throwaway line, that I should leave the beach by five o’clock. I wandered around taking pictures and was on my second roll of film, when Michelle points out that it’s five o’clock and the priestess had told us we should be off the beach. Give me few minutes and we’ll leave, I suggest. I pick up one of the flowers and place it in the ocean.

Suddenly, from nowhere, two kids snatch my camera and tape machine and run off, Michelle being knocked to the ground. We’re shaken but physically unharmed, and probably lucky not to have been injured as these young kids often have knives or guns. ‘She did warn us’, says Michelle, and I apologize to her.

That evening I decide to track down the priestess in the suburbs of Fortaleza. She lives in an unassuming house, except that in the back there is a large room dedicated to Yemaya, with a statue of the goddess. She mutters something, throws water on herself and goes into a semi-trance state, shuffles some Tarot cards and lays them out in front of her and proceeds to tell me my past and future. I’m curious that Tarot has been mixed in with this African and Catholic tradition. I can’t understand her well, but then the local English teacher comes to the house and begins to translate. She gets my past and present very accurately, so I’m impressed, but also nervous about what she will say about my future. Some is about future (which I can prevent or mitigate) disease, some vague (‘there will be a death in the family’ applies to nearly all of us), other stuff is positive, success, children and she describes my wife-to-be. None of which I know yet whether it’s true. She tells me I am protected by Yemaya and Chango, the male god of thunder, who will also protect the ‘powerful’ house I will live in. Many people have two of these deities protecting them – I’m inspired it’s these two, as out of the pantheon they were the ones I was always attracted to, a balance of masculine and feminine forces. She also tells me I need to let go of my last girlfriend, that my attachment to her is holding my progress back.

There are other annual Yemaya festivals in other parts of Brazil, in Salvador, Bahia and on New Year in Rio. It occurs to me that I hadn’t taken Yemaya seriously enough, ignoring the priestess’s warning, and instead picking up a flower on the beach. A week later, on my last day in Rio I buy a bunch of roses and some good perfume and go down to Ipanema, the beach associated with Yemaya there. I ask for forgiveness and express my gratitude to the Goddess as I wade into the ocean. At that point I feel a massive, healing force go through my body and find myself crying salt tears into the sea. I realize the priestess is right, I’m still hopelessly attached my ex-girlfriend, something I’d denied to myself, except for moments of despair and loneliness. I feel the power of my love for her, and also my gratitude for our wonderful times and the years we spent together. For the first time, I’m able to really feel that I genuinely wish her happiness. Utterly drained but cleansed also, perhaps twenty minutes later I return to my hotel and order a taxi to the airport. The next day, I’m smiling at people in a London bus stop when I get glances from those waiting that I really should keep my smiles to myself. They seem to think I am some kind of madman, pervert or eccentric. In a way, they are right, but I don’t care. I miss the warmth of Brazil, painfully, for weeks afterwards.

posted April 07, 2006 05:41 AM         

love and blessings for you and Matthias